= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Psychohistorian comments on Two Truths and a Lie - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (66)
It's an interesting experiment, and probably a good teaching exercise under controlled conditions to teach people about falsificationism, but real theories are too complex and theories about human behavior are way too complex.
Take the "slam dunk" theory of evolution. If "Some people and animals are homosexual" was in there, I'd pick that as the lie without even looking at the other two (well, if I didn't already know). There are some okay explanations of how homosexuality might fit into evolution, but they're not the sort of thing most people would start thinking about unless they already knew homosexuality existed.
(Another example: plate tectonics and "Hawaii, right smack in the middle of a huge plate, is full of volcanoes".)
As that bit shows, I agree completely. But while evolution is correct, you can't use it to go around making broad factual inferences. While you should believe in evolution, you shouldn't go around making statements like, "There are no homosexuals," or "Every behaviour is adaptive in a fairly obvious way," just because your theory predicts it. This exercise properly demonstrates that while the theory is true in a general sense, broad inferences based on a simplistic model of it are not appropriate.